The man came a step forward, and another.

“Tell me, Bess,” he demanded.  “Don’t you love me?”

“I have told you,” said a low voice.

Answering, coercing, swift as the swoop of a prairie hawk, as a human being in abandon, the man’s arms were about her.  Ere the girl could move or resist, his lips were upon her lips.  “You must go then,” he commanded.  “I’ll compel you to go.”  He kissed her again, hungrily, irresistibly.  “I won’t take no for an answer.  You will go.”

“Don’t, please,” pleaded a voice, breathless from its owner’s impotent effort to be free.  “You must not, we must not—­yet.  I’m bad, I know, but not wholly.  Please let me go.”

Unconscious of time, unconscious of place, oblivious to aught save the moment, the man held his ground, joying in his victory, in her effort to escape.  Save that one casual glance long before, he had not looked out of doors.  Had he done so, had he seen—.

But he had forgotten that a world existed without those four walls.  His back was toward the door.  His own great shoulders walled the girl in.  Neither he nor she dreamed of a dark figure that had drifted from out the prairie swiftly into the dooryard, dreamed that that same all-knowing shadow, on soundless moccasined feet, had advanced to the doorway, stood silent, watching therein.  As the first man and the first woman were alone, they fancied themselves alone.  As the first man might have exulted over his mate, Clayton Craig exulted now.

“Let you go, Bess,” he baited, “let you go now that I’ve just gotten you?” He laughed passionately.  “You must think that I’m made of clay and not of flesh and blood.”  He drew her closer and closer, until she could no longer struggle, until she lay still in his arms.  “I’ll never let you go again, girl, not if God himself were to demand your release.  You’re mine, Bess, mine by right of capture, mine—­”

The sentence halted midway; halted in a gasp and an unintelligible muttering in the throat.  Of a sudden, darkening, ominous, fateful, the shadow within the entrance had silently advanced until it stood beside them, paused so with folded arms.  Simultaneously the wife and the invader saw, realised.  Instantly, instinctively, like similar repellent poles, they sprang apart.  Enveloped in a maze of surging divergent passions, the two guilty humans stood silent so, staring at the intruder in breathless expectation, breathless fascination.

* * * * *

While an observer could have counted ten slowly, and repeated the count, the three remained precisely as they were.  While the same mythical spectator could have counted ten more, the silence held; but inaction had ceased.  While time, the relentless, checked off another measure, there was still no interruption; then of a sudden, desperately tense, desperately challenging, a voice sounded:  the voice of Clayton Craig.

“Well,” he queried, “why don’t you do something?” He moistened his lips and shuffled his feet restlessly.  “You’ve seen enough to understand, I guess.  What are you going to do about it?”